Mother earth day

By John Kastner Special to the Star Fri., July 6, 2018 “Roy Cohn, it is said, is the personification of evil.” —Esquire Magazine Mr. Trudeau, I feel your pain at the hands of the world’s scariest bigmouth. Because I once went head to head with the man who, it’s said, taught the U.S. president everything he knows about the scorched-earth tactics he has been using on you: the bullying, brazening, threatening, bare-knuckled counterpunching — all of it, Trump learned at the knee of his admiring mentor Roy Cohn, the ferocious commie hunter described in the play Angels in America as the worst man who ever lived. As the New York Times put it: “Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid — the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as a brand, seemed to have been ripped straight out of the Cohn playbook.” For more than a dozen years, Cohn was Donald Trump’s own legal pit bull. As … [Read more...] about The day I faced off with the pitbull lawyer who taught Trump how to attack

By Mark Zwolinski Sports Reporter Fri., June 15, 2018 It’s a month away from a basketball tournament fundraiser for her son, and Suzett Ball’s heart is stirring with emotions. And for the first time in a long time, most of those emotions are good ones. “You know what, for the first time in a long time, he’s doing much better,” says Ball, whose son, Rayvonte, collapsed during a March 2017 basketball game, and went on to suffer brain damage. Ball is looking forward now to a July 7 tournament which is aimed at raising funds for her son, specifically for a wheelchair van that will be needed to transport him to and from school and rehab. Ball is also looking forward to the day 18-year-old Rayvonte comes home. Article Continued Below A year ago, she was helplessly looking over her son, who was in a coma for two months after the incident, which happened during a Central Tech game. Doctors diagnosed Rayvonte with a heart rhythm … [Read more...] about Mother’s despair gives way to hope as she watches recovering son Rayvonte Ball

Scientists said Wednesday they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new. Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of today's lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature. This finding dragged the group back in time by 75 million years, and means that "lizards inhabited the planet since at least 240 million years ago," study co-author Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP. That, in turn, suggested that squamates had already split from other ancient reptiles before the Permian/Triassic mass extinction some 252 million years ago, and survived it. Up to 95 percent of marine- and 75 percent of terrestrial life on Earth was lost. Megachirella, discovered some 20 years ago buried in compacted sand and clay layers in the … [Read more...] about The mother of all lizards found in Italian Alps

MANILA - Celeste Cortesi, the newly crowned Miss Earth Philippines, is grateful that her Filipina mother pushed her to pursue her dreams of becoming a beauty queen. Speaking to ABS-CBN News after the coronation night at the Mall of Asia Arena on Saturday, Cortesi said the credit goes to her mom who helped her in this journey every step of the way. “My mom pushed me to participate in this pageant. My motivation is because my dream was to be here in the Philippines and to work here in the Philippines. I chose this pageant because it’s not only [about one’s] beauty,” she said. However, it wasn’t an easy ride to victory for the the 20-year-old beauty who was born and raised in Rome. “It’s my first time here in the Philippines and I went here without knowing the language,” she said. “It was really hard to be here. And English is also not comfortable for me.” Pinay from Italy crowned Miss Earth PH 2018 Nonetheless, Cortesi is … [Read more...] about News
New Miss Earth PH talks about biggest challenge in joining pageant

The opening piece of Irish writer’s Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite, unsettling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, details her encounter, at the age of 18, with a budding killer in the hills near where she is working as a hotel maid. The tone is matter-of-fact, delineating both the author’s clear instinct for danger and her awareness that the man she meets on the deserted path is — quite literally — the stuff of bad news. But more remarkable is O’Farrell’s willingness to acknowledge that this brush with death, although ripe for gossip and sensationalism, “is not something to be lightly articulated, moulded into anecdote, formed into a familiar spoken groove.” In this and in subsequent essays in the memoir, O’Farrell proves the decision to share her stories has not been made lightly — and that excellent memoirs have less to do with exposing secrets than forging meaning from life’s inevitable … [Read more...] about Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am I Am I Am: The precarious and precious nature of our days on earth